Back door gun registry

We’ve got a problem across Canada right now regarding gun registries, government appointees overstepping their bounds and the fact that, try as you might it is pretty near impossible to kill off a government program.

This all started when Sun News received a letter from Ontario’s Chief Firearms Officer directed at gun retailers in the province.

The letter essentially said that sure the feds may have killed off the gun registry but we are going to force you, the store owner selling rifles and shotguns, to keep a new paper one.

Reports we’ve had from viewers indicate that other provinces are doing the same thing, telling retailers that they must keep records of the name, address, telephone number and licence number of everyone buying a gun plus they need to write down what kind of firearm was purchased.

This is a registry by any other name and no weasel words from the provincially appointed bureaucrats will change that.

Premier Dad Dalton McGuinty says he’s not starting a new registry but adds that keeping these records – which is 95% of what was in the old gun registry just makes sense.

Ontario’s cop out is that these records won’t be centralized on a government computer. So what, they will be on store computers across the province and will allow Ontario to recreate a gun registry if they wish or to just make sure the information is there for when the NDP or federal Liberals retake power in a few years time.

McGuinty didn’t run on recreating the gun registry in last fall’s election, neither did Brad Wall in Saskatchewan, nor Alison Redford in Alberta just a couple of weeks ago. But that doesn’t really matter does it.

They don’t need to. They have the permanent bureaucracy.

The Harper Conservatives passed Bill C-19 which killed off the gun registry but they did not eliminate the bureaucratic structure that was built up to assemble and run the registry including positions such as provincial chief firearms officers.

Bureaucrats with little to do will eventually find something to do and too often it will include finding new ways to run your life. Bureaucrats like to meddle which is what they are doing here.

Bureaucracies are self-perpetuating organizations, they will grow and grow and grow unless you kill them off.

Now some will argue, as they did with the gun registry, that there is no big deal in taking down all this information. After all this is a restricted product.

Really?

Cigarettes are a restricted product and we know that cigarettes kill people but do we write down all your contact information, your licence and such each time someone buys a pack of smokes?

No we don’t.

Do we track alcohol purchases? Booze is a restricted product that you need to meet certain requirements in order to purchase but we don’t keep databases of your personal data along with what you purchased. The government liquor store here in Ontario does not have a record of every bottle of booze I have purchased and neither would I want them to. Would you like that kind of record on you?

The permanent bureaucracy and the governments that want this info, like McGuinty and Redford are trying to say these are just paper ledgers. It’s just paper – can’t even be searched.

To says what I am thinking in polite terms, horsefeathers.

Business today runs on computers and if gun retailers and outdoors shops are told to keep this data it will be on computers and it will allow the liberal left provincial governments to start their own databases.

Do you really think the cops won’t have access to this information?

The gun registry was ended by an act of Parliament, we should not accept the provinces creating a shadow registry.

I don’t really care one way or another about the gun registry, but I read the article anyway.

One thing I would like to clarify though. So you are AGAINST the government bureaucracy meddling and running our lives when it comes to the gun registry, but you would love for the government to step in and run our lives by prohibiting abortion. Do I have that right? Just checking.

I hope the urban gun-phobia crowd to which McGuinty has cynically tossed this vote getter bone, realise that the data collected from firearms retailers is A) Quickly out dated and redundant and B) so woefully unreliable it will make police criminally liable if they ever were to use it as an excuse for a warrant.

First,99% of unrestricted sporting long arms in Canada are imported – CCRA keeps records of every arm coming into the country and police have full access to this, duplicating this data at retail is silly and useless, unless you are using it as a cynical political placebo.

Second, many (probably the majority) of unrestricted sporting arm sales are between individuals, who have no legal liability to keep a record of the buyer or the sale. Unrestricted firearms change hands often. A Shotgun bought at Canadian tire could go through 2 or 3 owners at a fairly high rate making any point of sale data tracking completely out of data in a matter of weeks or months.

Third: this point of sale record keeping is so useless to crime solving/prevention, the police rarely use these records – my case in point is a first hand experience with a very close family acquaintance who ran a gun store in a small Ontario town since the late 40s. I was in and out of the place regularly, and never saw a cop chcking the sales books. I went in one day in the late 70s when he was moving his location and packing up and I noticed a huge stack of ledgers sitting in several boxes waiting for the trash. I asked the owner why he was throwing out what appeared to be book keeping records – he replied that these were records of gun and ammo sales which he must keep to fulfil conditions of his firearms retailer permit. I noticed the logs went back to almost when he started the business 30 years ago. I asked why he had hung on to them instead of giving them to the police firearms inspector as per the legal requirement. He said the inspector was in all the time to check if he had them but never wanted to take them with him, when he phoned saying he was relocating that he wanted the police to take these records , they replied they had no need for them and to just THROW THEM OUT.

True story

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Brian Lilley is the host of Byline on Sun News Network and a senior correspondent for Sun Media's Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa. His weekly column is published in more than 30 daily newspapers across Canada and he appears on several leading talk radio stations.